VAIL — Aspen’s Tejay van Garderen has about a minute and a half lead, not insurmountable in some stage races but likely impossible to beat in the USA Pro Challenge.

The remaining two stages are Saturday’s 115.2-mile course from Loveland to Fort Collins. It features a Category 2 climb (5 is the lowest) up 8,000-foot Devil’s Gulch but it’s in the middle of the race and nearly downhill from there.

Sunday’s stage is nearly ceremonial, similar to the final days into Paris in the Tour de France. It’s seven laps totalling 72.4 flat miles through Denver. Van Garderen can not possibly lose 90 seconds over those two stages.

Cyclists leave downtown Aspen for Stage 2 of the USA Pro Challenge from Aspen to Breckenridge on Tuesday. (Hyoung Chang, The Denver Post)

STEAMBOAT SPRINGS — It’s Stage 3 of the weeklong USA Pro Challenge, and I’m seeing some advantages this race has over the Tour de France. So here are the pluses and minuses the Pro Challenge has with Le Tour.

PLUSES

1. The towns. What? Yes, towns. OK, take Paris out of the equation. I love Denver, but when it comes to architecture, the Eiffel Tower has a wee bit over the Wells Fargo Center. Still, the towns the Pro Challenge race through in Colorado are more scenic. Much of it is because Colorado mountain towns are more modern and richer than ancient villes in France. I’ll take Aspen over Grenoble; Breckenridge over l’Alpe d’Huez. With the Yampa River meandering through this lovely town, Steamboat Springs has a ski pole up on any village I saw in the Pyrenees.

2. Weather. The hottest it has been this week has been low 80s and dry. At night it drops to about 60. It’s absolutely flawless. Saturday’s Loveland-Fort Collins stage is scheduled for 87 but I’m still recovering from the steambaths I’ve experienced in Provence.

Tourists on Monday visit Tiananmen Square, which is shrouded with heavy smog. Pollution levels remained high just 11 days before the Olympics. The Chinese capital could ban 90 percent of private cars from its roads and close more factories in a last-ditch bid to clear smoggy skies for the Olympics, state media reported. (Andrew Wong/Getty Images)

John Henderson: Yangshuo, China — I was the first member of the Denver Post Olympics team, a threat to no one in any relay but the four-man chug-off, to arrive in Beijing. In fact, I may have been one of the first American reporters. I left Thursday, and when I arrived it looked like the Beijing that I had imagined all these decades. I walked out of the terminal and dawn was just enveloping the city. Beijing appeared masked in a mysterious morning fog. A misty, gray cloak had covered a city that dates back to Genghis Khan 800 years ago.

I kept looking for a large group of elderly Chinese practicing tai-chi, their slow, fluid movements a human poetry against a backdrop of ancient China. I listened for twangy Chinese music and lotus flowers blooming on the sidewalk. Then I peered closer. The silver mist didn’t look so romantic anymore. No wonder. It wasn’t fog.

It was smog.

Folks, Beijing’s air is as filthy as you’ve heard. I arrived 13 days before the opening ceremony. It’s about the time the government started limiting car usage and stopped street construction just so you can walk a few blocks without hacking up your esophagus. Looking at the air quality, Beijing would have to use rickshaws for the next 20 years to clean it up.

Cholet, France — A major upset occurred at Tuesday’s Tour de France. I, John Howard Henderson, did not get lost.

The hundreds of cycling journalists who cover this event every year know me well. I’m the one who comes into the salle de presse (press room) every day, frazzled, broken and beaten. My hair is half torn out. My eyes are bloodshot. My heart is racing faster than all of these cyclists.

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David Millar of Great Britain during the third stage near Cholet, France. (AP Photo/Patrice Mollet)

Getting lost is part of the di rigueur at the Tour. However, in four previous years covering this remarkable, beautiful, maddening event, I turned getting lost into an art form. It once took me 45 minutes to get out of a parking lot. Hey, I didn’t know if I was leaving the right way. In France, if you get going in the wrong direction, you’ll be in Pamplona looking for bulls to trample you by the time you know you’re lost.

Because of my mountaineering background, which includes a trip to Mount Everest in 1985 and many friends who have been regular visitors to Tibet, I have long been particularly sensitive to the plight of Tibet and its people. But I am appalled by the attempts of pro-Tibet activists to obstruct the journey of the Olympic Flame — or extinguish it — on its relay from the site of ancient Olympia to Beijing.

I spent the better part of three hours watching CNN coverage of the fiasco in San Francisco Wednesday. While I’m not usually a fan of placard-waving protests, I have no problem with people who show up at the torch relay to protest Chinese behavior. But attempts to disrupt the relay are despicable — and counter-productive. If there hadn’t been attempts to thwart the relay’s progress in London and Paris, raising the real potental of violence and injury, I’m betting San Francisco officials would have kept the flame on its originally scheduled route. After all, SF is hardly an inhospitable place for free expression.

Speaking in opposition to tyranny is honorable, but activists surrender moral authority when they adopt the kind of tactics they seek to oppose.

There are those who wonder how the International Olympic Committee ever thought it could avoid its current public relations nightmare when it awarded the 2008 Olympics to a repressive Chinese regime in Beijing.

My question: Why did China’s rulers ever think they could continue to suppress human rights without incurring the wrath of politicians and activists around the world as the Games approach? After all, China accepted the 2008 Games with assurances there would be progress on human rights, promises which seem not to have been met.

I covered the meetings in Moscow seven years ago when Beijing beat Toronto for the 2008 Summer Games and Jacques Rogge was elected to succeed Juan Antonio Samaranch as IOC president. I remember the debate well: Is it better to deny Beijing the Games and isolate the world’s most populous country further, or let it have the Games and hope worldwide attention would encourage it to moderate its behavior.

The IOC bet on engagement. Now it looks like a losing bet.

One more point: Protesting the Olympic torch relay is one thing, but the acts of violent disruption and obstruction that occurred this week in London and Paris are despicable. Let’s hope we don’t see the same Wednesday in San Francisco — but I’m afraid we will.